


Entanglement

by SouthernContinentSkies



Category: A Memory Called Empire - Arkady Martine
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Loyalty, M/M, V-shaped polyamory, conflicting agendas, conflicting emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:47:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28143348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthernContinentSkies/pseuds/SouthernContinentSkies
Summary: In Teixcalaan, these things are certain: poetry, and betrayal.
Relationships: Nineteen Adze & Six Direction, Nineteen Adze/Yskandr Aghavn, Six Direction/Yskandr Aghavn
Comments: 15
Kudos: 27
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Entanglement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass/gifts).



In Teixcalaan, these things are certain: poetry, and betrayal.

They are in her bed together, not for the first time, tangled in the wide expanse of her white sheets. Sometimes, in the mellow detente of afterglow, they explore the future, rehashing politics in a lovers’ murmur, softer and more yielding than fifteen-syllable verse. Tonight, at Nineteen Adze’s subtle prompting, they are discussing what Yskandr hopefully believes is the past.

“I’m a bit surprised you even looked at me,” Nineteen Adze says, running her fingers over Yskandr’s high forehead and stationer-short hair. “Your vision being usually so full of other things.”

His eyes widen in a familiar Teixcalaanli smile. “You catch all the light in the room and bend it around yourself,” he says. “Just like him. How could I not?”

“I would have thought he’d want to be exclusive.”

“I don’t belong to him,” Yskandr says, eyes no longer wide, but kind. “Any more than he belongs to me. That’s the point.”

_Yes_ , Nineteen Adze thinks, bending in to kiss him before her face betrays her. _Yes, unfortunately, it is._

* * *

At Ten Pearl’s table, Nineteen Adze sits stone-faced, watching her lover and most captivating rival choke on air.

The method is not optimal; asphyxiation is not kind. But plausible deniability is more important, and relying on subtle nudges to Ten Pearl’s imagination has severely limited her options. There are better deaths, but there are worse as well. It works; it is enough.

She can see him watching her, from the floor. Desperation, fear, and possibly a flash of hurt play out across his face. She does not look away. His death is necessary, but she does respect him; she owes him that much.

She stays long enough to hear Ten Pearl calling in the “accident” - after, of course, he disposes safely of the needle - and to see the Sunlit properly take down their report, and then she leaves.

Her apartments are, as always, a refuge of grey and rose, clean lines and clean light. There are no dishes on the floor, thrown from the table by a convulsing hand; no furrows in the carpet, from a desperate grasp at air. No indentation on the other pillow on her bed.

She stands in her empty bedroom, taking stock. She is empty of regrets. She is empty of most other things as well. Her mind feels scoured clean, and she thinks that if she dared to prod it, she could feel a tender rawness beneath the smoothness of her mask.

She goes to sleep.

* * *

When the Emperor summons her, it is not a surprise. Nor is the silence with which he greets her, nor the mask-like quality of his face. 

He regards her from the couch in his chambers, deep in the center of Palace-Earth, with the sunlamps spinning around him, as he has done many times before. This time, unlike the others, she stands across the room before him, a distant petitioner, and he does not suggest she sit.

She waits for him to speak, of course; it is only proper. And she resigned herself to both her actions and their consequences before the dinner invitation had been penned. She has her own mask, and she makes her face serene beneath his scrutiny.

At last, His Illuminate Majesty speaks. “Explain yourself.”

“I am your sworn companion, Your Brilliance,” she says, using an elevated form of that address that they had dropped in recent times, in private. Shared lovers are a certain type of bond. Shared grief, as well, perhaps - but not today. “I would drain the last drop of my blood into your hands. As it happened, it was not mine that needed to be spilled. I did not enjoy it, but I do not regret it, either. It was my duty.”

“To protect me.” His mask cracks into stone, jagged surface sharp enough to cut.

She says nothing. 

“He was not a _passing fancy_ , Nineteen Adze,” he says, mask not quite breaking under strain, an intimacy all its own to come so close to vulnerability in front of her. “Nor some student's unwise dalliance with the exotic. If he were a citizen…”

The tension in her shoulders leaves her. This was a rebuke, an expression of extreme displeasure - but not a retaliation. “If he had been a citizen, Your Brilliance, he would never have suggested such a thing, much less for such a reason, and I would not have had to do this.”

Six Direction closes his eyes, breathes out in something not quite a sigh.

“But instead he was a foreigner,” Nineteen Adze continues. “From a station that makes immortality-machines. If they work as he told you they do, he may well come back.”

“Not as himself,” Six Direction says, revealing more knowledge of the process than Nineteen Adze had pessimistically expected him to have. “A younger version, from before we truly met. It’s been fifteen years since he went back. It wouldn’t be the same.”

“If it’s at all Yskandr, I’m sure you could seduce him a second time.”

The moment she says it, she knows it was too much. His anger sweeps across her a laser-beam, burning through her to the back of her skull. Her spine straightens automatically.

“If he returns, Your Brilliance, then I have not killed him,” she says, stalwart in the face of his fury. “And if he is truly gone, then his promises were lies, the desperate currency of an outmatched barbarian, and I have done both of us a service.” It takes all her training to produce this sentence without wavering. That truth would hurt her, and hurt Six Direction worse, but Yskandr was a politician, from a post without much leverage, and efficient molybdenum extraction is no barrier to imperial expansion towards his home. It is a possibility that cannot be discarded.

Six Direction’s jaw sets against it. “Ambassador Aghavn's position predates yours, _ezuazuacat_. I _trusted_ him. You should have trusted me.”

“You would have been a _child_ ,” Nineteen Adze gets out, her own jaw tightening in anger and residual fear. “You would have been a ten-year-old on the sun-spear throne, between a woman old enough to need her own affairs in order, and a jumped-up tradesman who would kill you tomorrow if he thought it would get him what he wants.”

“I can handle Eight Loop and Thirty Larkspur.” The Emperor does not yell, but Six Direction knows exactly how to intensify his voice without raising it.

“ _You_ can. A ten-year-old boy most certainly cannot. Your words, from his lips, would have been…” She trails off, suppressing a shudder. “Either it would not have worked, or you would have been exposed, instantly. How many Ministers would follow a child with a barbarian immortality-machine in his head? How many _yaotleklim?_ If it didn’t destroy you in the process, it certainly would have done so afterward, and the entire world with it!”

Nineteen Adze is a consummate politician, but she is not the Emperor, upon whose clarity and evenness of mind rests the serenity of the Imperium. She can raise her voice if she must.

In the face of her vehemence, Six Direction does sigh, now, averting his gaze as if to thus avoid this argument entirely.

“Nineteen Adze,” he says, looking past her to the far wall. “Please leave.”

The look she gives him would be far too open for a public audience: concern, frustration, sorrow, and above all, care. Nevertheless, she makes the most correct of courtly bows, committing his face in this moment to her memory in all its subtle tells, and then she turns and walks away. The doors of the inner chamber close behind her.

On the other side, the Emperor is alone.


End file.
